August 2017

On August 15, 2017, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Robins v. Spokeo[1] (“Spokeo II”) that the violation of a consumer’s statutory rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”) was sufficient to constitute “injury-in-fact” for the purpose of establishing Article III standing. The case involved claims brought by a consumer under the FCRA alleging that Spokeo—an online search engine that compiles and publishes data about individuals including their employment information, education, names of family members and marital status—had published false information about him. As discussed previously on this blog, the Supreme Court in 2016 remanded the case after determining that the Ninth Circuit had failed to properly consider the “concreteness” component of the “injury-in-fact” requirement. In its opinion, the Supreme Court emphasized that a procedural statutory violation alone would not necessarily suffice and that a concrete injury must be “real” and not merely “abstract.”[2]

In Spokeo II, the Ninth Circuit zeroed in on the question of whether an FCRA violation represents the type of statutory violation that can itself constitute a cognizable injury, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s admonition that a plaintiff does not “automatically satisf[y] the injury-in-fact requirements whenever a statute grants a person a statutory right and purports to authorize that person to sue to vindicate that right.”[3]